I figured I’d be posting a lot of Maemo and N900 specific stuff in the future so created a subdomain category specifically for it.
If you want to keep up with that you can read it on the main site or on the maemo subdomain.
After years of censoring their search results to operate within the law in China it seems that Google might have finally decided to live up to their motto “Do no evil”.
It seems there were some attacks on the gmail accounts of Chinese Human Rights advocates and Google have now decided it’s time for a new approach to China.
Of course if google stops censoring their results they will just be blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”. Baidu, the current number one search engine in China, will take a greater hold of the market. Being a Chinese company there is no chance of them ever returning results the government don’t want the people to see.
Having lived in China I know how difficult it can be to find uncensored news and opinion without employing proxies or vpns to get around the blocking. Google’s censorship however wasn’t 100% and whilst useful things like Google News and Google Cache were unavailable you could still find things the chinese would probably prefer you didn’t see. So the question is; Is no Google in China better than a Censored Google?
It’s a tough one.
My N900 finally arrived on monday after UPS failed to find an 8 story office block in central London two days running. I think it would have gotten here quicker if Nokia had tied it to a blind monkey and thrown bananas in my general direction. Anyway it got here eventually.
So far loving it. There are some software glitches but i’d expect them to be ironed out in the next firmware or two.
Currently writing this is on the phone with MaStory, a wordpress app for Maemo. Seems to work pretty well and can upload media too.
Another thing i’m enjoying is watching normal standard def divx videos. No need to reencode anything, just copy across and watch. The media player also plays ogg music files which is good as i ripped most of my cd collection to ogg.
Will update with more details as i explore the available software further.
Just got this from Nokia:
Welcome to the N900 meet-up !
The London meet-up is held in the St. Martins Lane Hotel (www.stmartinslane.com) Tuesday the 17th of November.
The doors open at 7.30pm and the ‘official’ part starts at 8pm. For the following couple of hours you will be able to meet likeminded people, as well as Maemo folks from Nokia and the community.
We will provide some nibble food and N900 demos, so you can get a feel for the device in case you have not had the chance yet or just have fun with it. The event then ends at 10pm after which we can continue the chats elsewhere. We will also have a surprise lottery at the end of the event.
As the space is limited, we have a name list at the door so we ask you to bring a piece of identification with you.
We are very excited about the N900, and we hope you are as well!
Should be interesting.
This weekend I had a play with the Maemo SDK and tried out a number of the apps available. I’m trying to setup the dev environment so I can try out some of my rusty python skills, but part of it wasn’t agreeing with Windows 7 too much. I may have a solution that I’ll try later.
Popped into Nokia Flagship Store again today, but no Maemo Lounge open yet. As it was announced the N900 was shipping out today hopefully that’ll be up and running soon.
Yesterday I heard down the twitter wire that the UK Nokia Flagship store had a N900 in for people to check out so I headed down there at lunch.
I played with it for about 15 minutes. I wont go into too much detail but I definitely liked what I saw. The touch screen was very responsive and the slide out keyboard gave good feedback. The software on the device looked pretty nice but it’ll take a bit more time with it to be sure.
Rumour is that the device will be released on Monday (9th Nov) but the guys in the Nokia store are keeping very tight lipped.
I went back down there today with a friend who wanted to check the device out and whilst there we had a quick chat with Adam who mans the NokiaFlagshipUK twitter account. Whilst there is nothing definite he mentioned there may be a get together with the Nokia Bloggers when the phone is launched.
They are currently setting up a room at the back of the store dubbed the Maemo Lounge which will have 5 N900s to play with and a maemo expert on hand to answer questions. This should be open Saturday or Monday. I’ll be down there Monday to have another look.
On the 17th there is a N900 meetup at the store which is now taking registrations here, I’m signed up and looking forward to it.
My N95 died last night so the sooner the N900 is released the better!
Seems my plan to get easy entry to the London N900 meetup failed.
Currently you can’t register for the London event as they’ve not announced the date. However last week I found with a little javascript trickery you could get around it and signed up myself and a friend. I got confirmation emails and the number of seats available did go down by 2. It seemed I wasn’t alone and by earlier today the number of available seats was down to 73 (out of 80).
I just checked now and noticed the available seats were back up to the original 80. I guess this means my registration is not valid. Being a bit cheeky I did try the same method I used before to register, but it seems they’ve gotten wise to the hole and plugged it. 
I’m thinking this could mean that they are going to announce the date very soon and open up registrations properly. I will be watching the page very closely and hope to get into the event the old fashion way.
I love my Nokia N95, I’ve had it over 2 years and it’s pretty much always been good to me. In return I’ve done my best to take good care of it. I’ve bought it two new screens and two new cases in it’s life (ok, I’m not the most careful owner).
However good things come to an end and now I’m back in the UK and using the internet over the phone I really need a full keyboard and a bigger screen.
Most of my friends fell for the iPhone and swear by it, but there are somethings that make it a no go for me:
Now the most obvious upgrade path for me was a Nokia N97 and until a month or so ago that was what I was going to buy. Then I started to read more and more about the Nokia N900.
Firstly the hardware looks great, ok it’s not the smallest phone in the world but I’m going to be using it as an internet device way more than I’ll be holding it to my ear. The software is the interesting part. Rather than using Symbian S60 like Nokia’s other smartphones it uses Maemo. Maemo is a linux distribution for mobile devices that’s been in development for a while but is now starting to mature. Videos of it in action on the N900 are really quite impressive and it seems to handle multitasking very well indeed.
The main problem is the apps. There is a fairly large library of apps from previous version of Maemo, some which were originally desktop linux apps that have been modified for the mobile device. The trouble is I’m quite attached to a number of the Symbian apps that I’ve been running on my N95 for the last two years. Some are written by Nokia so may get ported across, others like Shozu are less likely. It makes it a tough decision, but the fact that the Maemo OS is very open really is swinging it at the moment. Having a fully accessible linux device in the palm of my hand is very attractive to the geek in me.
I hope to get my hands on a N900 as soon as possible, even cheating my way into an N900 meetup in London soon. I just hope that it lives up to everything I’ve read and seen so far.
So, the unthinkable happened. I liked Windows 7 RC. It’s true, I tried it and it didn’t suck. Even better than it not sucking, it was actually nice to use.
One thing that I think worked in Win7’s favour is that with each Ubuntu release I’ve been becoming more and more disillusioned with a Linux Desktop. Every release fixed something on my laptop only for something else to break. I’m also fed up with the Gnome project’s release plan which seems to be think of something cool and experimental and put it in a full release before it really works correctly. Meanwhile they remove simple things like font installation and don’t bother to replace them (seems someone did finally notice).
So basically a few weeks after the release of Ubuntu 9.04 I got fed up and realised it was time to start seeing other operating systems. I decided I’d give it 6 months until the next version of Ubuntu, meanwhile I’d try something else. I reduced the size of my Ubuntu install and created a spare partition on which I installed Win7 RC.
I thought moving back to windows after using a linux desktop for over 8 years would be tough, but in fact it was really easy. Also I had access to things like the Nokia software to connect with my N95, a recent version of Skype, a fairly decent all-in-one IM and Social Network application, and TortoiseSVN. I still used Firefox for web, Thunderbird for email, and Open Office for my documents.
Here we are, almost 6 months later, and the next version of Ubuntu out next week. Since I got back to the UK I upgraded my desktop machine from Ubuntu 7.10 to 9.10 beta and had a quick play. It certainly looks nice, but the problems I’ve had in the past were related to my laptop, so I’ll have to wait until 9.10 is fully released before I’ll know if things are working properly. I’ll also need to see what’s new and broken in GNOME. If things are working better I will probably go back to a Linux desktop, but I will most certainly be running Windows 7 in VirtualBox.
It seems the big four browsers (firefox, ie, opera and safari) all have a new versions in development due next year. Along with the new contender from Google, Chrome. There is a brief but interesting roundup of when each will be out and what new features and improvements they should be sporting.
I’m currently a firefox user and think it will probably stay that way. Whilst Chrome looks interesting in terms of speed it seems to lack a lot of other features that make browsers good in my opinion. Also the downside is so far no Linux version so I can’t use it natively on my choice of desktop. Safari and IE again no use to me which leaves Opera. Opera seems fairly nice and has good speed and standards compliance. The only problem is that there are some firefox add-ons that I can’t live without.
I currently have 18 extensions installed. Things like Firebug and the Web Developer extension I couldn’t live without in my line of work. I’m also falling for Ubiquity which has some awesome features and, whilst still fairly experimental, show’s a lot of promise.
I’m surprised that no other browsers have such a fantastic extension feature as Firefox. If a couple of the best extensions made their way onto other browsers I’d take a proper look at them. Until then for me there is no point. Firefox might not be the fastest and cleanest browser in the world but the extensions make it priceless.
Pretty please, someone buy me a Canon EOS 50D. I’ll be your best friend forever and ever!
Seriously, my feelings toward this camera are bordering on illegal.
I love my EOS 350D dearly but sometimes something else comes along that just knocks you off your feet. You’re left wondering if you should keep trying in the current relationship knowing that you will probably never be completely happy or call it a day and move on.
A breakup of this kind will be very expensive and I will miss my old flame but sometimes you just have to do the right thing for both of you.
